


She is Made of Light

by PBS_is_killing_me



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, I Only Have a Faint Idea of Where This is Going, I'm Bad At Tagging, I'm Sorry, My First Fanfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-21 05:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10678755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PBS_is_killing_me/pseuds/PBS_is_killing_me
Summary: You have been dead for a long time. You have resigned yourself to a lonely existence wandering around the park where you died. It's been decades and no one has ever been able to see or hear you. Until one day, a kind stranger changes everything.I'm bad at summaries.





	1. Interrupted

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I have ever, in my entire life, ever let anyone read anything I have written. Pushing the post button is going to be one of the most terrifying things I have ever done in my life. Feedback of any kind is appreciated.  
> Sort of inspired by a book I read a long time ago and barely remember called A certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb. Ghosts and Sadness.  
> The first chapter is really short. The rest will probably be longer.

You were crying again. Try as you might to keep the loneliness at bay, you just couldn’t stop it from catching up to you every now and again. You always tried to look at the bright side of things, but that wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do when you were dead. You spent day after day wandering through the park trying to distract yourself by people watching or talking to yourself. Sometimes, in a fit of desperation, you would stand right in front of someone’s face and scream as loud as you could, hoping that by some miracle, they would notice you. You knew it was useless, but it was the only thing you could think of to do. 

Unable to leave the park, you had resigned yourself to spending a lonely eternity here. Every now and again that thought would catch up to you. The thought that this would be your existence forever. There were days when you could deal with this and then there were days when all you could bring yourself to do was curl up into a ball and cry.

You hadn’t quite dissolved into a full breakdown yet, but you could feel it on the horizon. You were standing on a bridge looking at the small ravine below you. If you still had the ability to produce tears, they would have been streaming down your face. You were doing everything else that went along with crying though. Your whole body was shaking, your face, contorted with emotion, was buried in your hands, letting out sobs that no one could hear. You didn’t know how long you had been like that. Since before the sun came up at least. Now it was bright outside and there were a lot of people out. 

You heard someone talking. You didn’t know what they had said and you didn’t care. Many people had gone by, walking or jogging, alone or in pairs, talking or silent. None of them noticed you. You had given up hope that someone would notice you long ago. So when you heard a man’s voice next to you, you didn’t respond. You didn’t even look up at him. He was talking on his phone or talking to another person. He wasn’t talking to you. No one had ever spoken to you. 

You heard him stop walking as he reached the spot next to where you were standing. He spoke again. “Are you okay?”

You turned to look at him. He was very tall. He had curly brown hair and a kind smile. And he was looking right at you. 

No, not at you, through you, you reminded yourself. No one could see you. You were starting to panic a little bit in the back of your mind and you had no idea why. You turned around to see what he was looking at. There was nothing behind you, just the end of the bridge and some more trees. Nothing significant that he might have been looking at. You turned back around. 

You had been in this state long enough that you were used to the way people looked through you. Their eyes would simply slide right over you, seamlessly looking from one thing to the next. Even if you stood right in a person’s way, there wouldn’t be even the slightest change in facial expression. Their eyes were always missing that spark of recognition that living humans had when they looked at each other. That small sense of “Hey, you’re a human being and I’m a human being and we are looking at each other.” You didn’t even think that living people knew that they were doing it. They just did. You only knew because you had noticed it’s absence. No one looked at you that way. Maybe that’s why you were so afraid. Because you could now see that recognition in this man’s eyes. 

You might have been able to convince yourself that he was looking in your direction by coincidence, if it weren’t for the look in his eyes. He was acknowledging you. He saw you. He knew you existed and that was terrifying. 

“Are you okay?” He asked again, clearly concerned but also perplexed. He was looking at you as though he was trying to figure out something complicated. A long moment of silence followed. The two of you looking at each other, both confused, saying nothing. Then you remembered that when people speak to each other, they usually expect some kind of response from the other person. 

“Me?” was all you could force yourself to say. You hadn’t spoken to anyone but yourself in so long, you had almost forgotten how a conversation works. You didn’t even know if you had the ability to make sounds that other people could hear. 

“Yeah. You look upset. I wanted to make sure you weren’t about to do anything crazy, you know.” 

There was no denying it now. This person was definitely talking to you. Shock and confusion instantly turned into pure panic. You took a few steps back. 

“You can see me?”

To this, he had no response. He just stood there looking twice as confused as before. He was looking at you very intensely now. He took a half step towards you and the panic took hold. You moved yourself instantly to the other side of the park, leaving him standing there by himself. You sat at the edge of the river and allowed yourself to really break down, now crying for an entirely different reason.


	2. A Certain Slant of Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone has been super nice to me and I can't even say how grateful I am. Thank you guys so much for the love. I hope you like chapter 2. It's from Dan's point of view.

Dan stood there on the bridge looking at the place where she had been standing. “What the fuck?” he said under his breath. Maybe the stress really was catching up to him. He had decided to come to the park today for exactly that reason. He had been overworking himself again lately and needed to take a walk and clear his head. He had left his phone behind in his car and started on the trail, determined not to think about anything except the trees and the sky. 

When he had seen the woman standing there he had been concerned. She was standing on a bridge with no shoes on looking down at the water, crying heavily. He was worried that she might be about to do something drastic, but when he tried to talk to her, it only seemed to scare her. And then she had just vanished. Just vanished into thin air. 

She must have been a hallucination, he decided. The stress was getting to him worse than he thought and now he was hallucinating about a pretty girl crying and disappearing. That was the only explanation for it. Real people don’t just disappear. 

Dan decided to continue his walk, now convinced that he needed it more than ever. He walked along the nature trail and back around to the soccer field where he had parked his car. He had only been to this park a few times before, but he really liked it. On one side of the parking lot there was a small building with bathrooms and a few vending machines. On the other side were two soccer fields where mostly little league teams practiced. Beyond the soccer fields there was a small playground and beyond that there was a large forest aria. The nature trail went around the whole thing. Most people used it for running or jogging, but it was nice if you just wanted to take a walk too. There were lots of benches where you could sit and admire the view of the trees or the small river that went through the woods. 

Dan had thought that this would be the perfect place to clear his mind, but on the drive home, his mind was anything but clear. He couldn’t stop thinking about the woman he had seen. Or thought he had seen. He found himself wondering if she was okay and then wondering if he was stupid for wondering if she was okay when she was clearly a figment of his imagination. This circular thinking went on for the rest of the day and was still going on as he tried to go to sleep that night. _Am I going crazy? Is this what going crazy feels like?_

The next day dragged by. He was busy all day and groggy from not getting much sleep. He decided not to mention the girl he had seen. He didn’t want his friends thinking he had snapped under the pressure of all the work he was putting on himself. That didn’t stop them from noticing that he seemed distracted all day. 

“Dude, you’ve been out of it all day. Are you sure there’s nothing bothering you?” Arin asked at the end of a long recording session. Dan had managed to keep his energy up for the show, but between episodes he had been uncharacteristically quiet. 

“Yeah, man. I’m fine. I just didn’t get much sleep last night. I’ll feel better after my day off tomorrow.” This answer seemed to satisfy Arin because he didn’t bother Dan about it again. 

Dan was so exhausted that he had little trouble getting to sleep that night. The next morning, he woke up feeling a lot better. He had plans to meet up with a friend for a late breakfast, but after that his day was free. 

It wasn’t often that Dan had a whole day to himself, so after breakfast he found himself wondering what to do. Without even really making a decision to go there, he found himself driving back to the same park where he had seen the girl two days before. Taking his phone with him this time, he headed back out on the trail. 

He tried not to admit to himself that he was looking for her. She wasn’t real after all. Just a figment of his imagination. Or so he kept telling himself. He walked the first mile of the trail, crossing the bridge where it had happened. He kept walking. After about an hour, when he was just starting to feel disappointed, he saw her. The trail had taken a sudden turn at the bottom of a hill to follow the river. As he turned the corner, he saw her standing knee deep in the water looking up at the trees. She wasn’t crying this time. That was good. Other than that, she looked exactly the same as last time he saw her. 

“Hey!” Dan shouted. Had he thought about it, he might have announced himself in a less sudden way. In his excitement, he forgot that he had scared her yesterday by talking to her. And he had scared her again this time. She whipped around at the sound of his voice. Her eye went wide. 

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one that he scared with his shout. There was an older couple a few feet behind him who had been powerwalking along the trail. They both jumped and then started looking back and forth between Dan and the river off in the direction where Dan was looking. They didn’t seem to notice the girl standing there. To them, Dan had just stopped in his tracks and shouted at nothing. They gave him suspicious looks as they passed. Dan just smiled and nodded at them, his suspicions that he was the only one who could see her now confirmed. 

He turned his attention back to her. She was still looking at him, but she didn’t look as scared. 

“Hello,” she said in a voice so quiet, it was barely above a whisper.

Dan waited for the couple to walk out of earshot before replying. “Hi. Sorry for startling you.” Dan was having trouble thinking of what to say. Now that he knew he was the only one who could see her, he was beginning to worry that he might have actually gone off the deep end. 

She also seemed to be at a loss for words. She kept opening and closing her mouth like she was about to say something but kept changing her mind. Then Dan noticed something. Ever since he had first seen her, there had been something nagging at the back of his mind. There had been something odd about her but Dan just couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Now it was clear as day to him. She wasn’t breathing. She was standing as still as a statue, no movement in her chest or shoulders. When he looked down at her lags, he saw that the water wasn’t rippling or moving around her like it should have been.

There was something else too. As he stood looking at her, he noticed that her image seemed to shimmer a bit. It was like the light, instead of hitting her skin, was moving right through her. It was beautiful, but eerie. 

He couldn’t take it anymore. He had spent almost two days trying not to freak out about this, but now it was just too weird. He let out the question that had been burning in his brain since he had first seen her crying on the bridge. The real reason he had been unable to sleep and had been unfocused the day before. 

“Who are you?”


	3. Ice

“Who are you?” the man asked, a growing look of desperation on his face. “What is even going on? Why couldn’t those people see you? And how did you just disappear? Are you even real? Wha. . .? How. . .?” The man’s rapid fire questions dissolved into sputtering noises and exasperated hand gestures. 

“Well, I don’t really know.” You knew this wouldn’t be a satisfying answer. “I’ll explain to you as much as I can but believe me, I’m just as confused about all this as you are,” you said. The look on his face suggested that he doubted this very much. 

“Come sit with me. This conversation may take a while.” You sat on a rock, letting your feet dangle over. The water was just barely covering your feet. The man sat next to you, taking his shoes off and doing the same thing. “I’m sorry I ran away from you before,” you said. 

“It’s okay. Why did you run though?” He asked. 

“I was scared. I’ve been like this for a long time. No one has ever been able to see me before. When you spoke to me, it was like the rules of my world all changed at once. I panicked. I’ve been spending the past few days trying to think of what I would say to you if you came back. I had hoped that you might be able to explain some things to me but judging by your reaction to seeing me today, I’m guessing you don’t know why you can see me either.” 

“No, sorry,” the man said. It was clear that he still had many questions and he was doing his best not to fling them at you all at once. “What do you mean you’ve been like this a long time? You’re not. . .? Are you a. . .?”

“Ghost?” you finished for him. “Yes, I believe I am.” 

“Oh. I’m sorry. I mean that. . . sucks. Well, I'm not trying to say that your life sucks. I mean not your life but your. . .”

You laughed, watching him dance around the subject of your death as though trying not to upset you. Your laughter sent a breeze through the leaves of a nearby bush. 

“It’s okay. I came to terms with my death a long time ago.”

So you told him. You told him everything you knew. You told him your name and the approximate age you were when you died which was all you remembered about your life. And you told him about being dead. 

 

The first thing you could clearly remember was the icy cold water crushing down on you. It burned down your throat, it filled your ears and nose. You reached out with your hands and found the muddy surface of the land. You pulled yourself up bit by bit. You have no way of knowing how long you struggled to escape, but it felt like hours. Finally, you reached the surface, pulling yourself out of the water. 

You laid on the ground drawing in desperate ragged breaths, but no amount of air was enough, the pain and the cold didn’t go away. You laid there for several minutes. The cold gradually left your body, taking with it the pain and the need for air. A growing sense of dread dawned on you as you started to realize what was happening. 

“No! I don’t want to die!” You shouted. You got up and started running along what would eventually become the nature trail. You had no idea where you were going, you were just running aimlessly. Eventually you saw the light of two flashlights combing through the woods. You ran towards them. 

“Oh, thank goodness!” you said with relief when you saw the two police officers making their way towards you. You started waving your arms above your head. “Hey! I’m over here! Can you help me?!” They must not have heard you because there was no response. You continued shouting until you were right in front of them. They finally stopped. The sun was coming up now. 

“There’s no sign of her. Not that we thought there would be,” one of the officers said to the other. 

“I knew we were wasting our time here. We would be more useful back at the station,” The other one replied. And with that, they just turned and walked off. 

You couldn’t believe your eyes. You had been right in front of them and they hadn’t seen you. Your worst suspicions were confirmed. You had died in the water. You had lost your life and with it all of your memories. You had no idea what happened to you or what you could do about it. You wandered back to the spot where you had come out of the water and sat on a rock. You didn’t feel tired. You didn’t feel any pain. You just felt empty. 

You spent the next few days wandering around the woods. You discovered that you couldn’t move objects or have any other effect on the world around you. Animals were just as oblivious to your presence as the police officers had been. It was also during this time when you discovered that you couldn’t stray too far from the place you had died. 

You had started at the rock on the riverbank and walked in one direction for a few hours. You noticed that the farther away from the river you got, the colder you began to feel. If you reached a certain distance, you would start to feel what you could only describe as an icicle stabbing into your heart. If you tried to keep going you would feel mud clinging to you, like water dragging you down. The pain would start to shoot up your legs and into your chest. You would have to turn around. 

After a few experiments to see how far you could go, you guessed it was about a five-mile radius from the rock by the riverbank. You couldn’t go any further. 

Originally, there was nothing there but a path through the trees and one bridge across the river. People would occasionally walk through, you guessed as a shortcut of some kind, but not very often. You were incredibly lonely in those days. You learned that, while you couldn’t physically move things in the normal way, your emotions would sometimes have an effect on the things around you. Intense frustration or anger might make things tremble. Small moments of joy would rustle the leaves and grass like a breeze. 

You stopped trying to measure time. It was pointless anyways. What did it matter to you? Your days were all the same. When they built the soccer field you knew it had been a few years since you had died, but you didn’t know exactly how many. You were less lonely after that. You could watch kids play soccer and watch the parents cheer them on. After that they built a second soccer field and a bigger parking lot. The playground quickly followed and several years later, the paved trail. 

You were happy that there were so many people around now. Some of them even brought books and you could read over their shoulders. You realized you missed reading. You missed a lot of things about living even though you had no memories of them. 

That was how you had spent the past few decades. You didn’t know how long it had actually been, but you estimated about fifty years. Spending every day in almost exactly the same way, wandering around, hoping something different would happen. And then one day it did, someone had seen you.


	4. Catching Up

Dan had listened to her entire story without interrupting. She had spoken haltingly at first, Dan guessed it was because she had probably never told this story before and because she was still getting used to talking to another person. But once she got going, the words just came pouring out of her. He listened patiently, even though he was shocked at what she told him. 

When she finished talking, he was still in shock. “You spent all that time alone? That must have been awful.” 

The expression on her face went from relief to slight embarrassment. Like she was worried she had said too much. “What about you?” she asked, obviously trying to change the subject. “What do you do? Have you ever seen a ghost before me? Or anything like that? I just realized, I told you everything I know about myself and I didn’t even give you a chance to tell me your name.”

Dan laughed. “My name is Dan. And no, I’ve never seen a ghost before. I didn’t even believe in ghosts until now.” A few people were walking by. Dan got the idea to take his phone out of his pocket and hold it up so that he could keep talking and not look like a crazy person. Dan talked about himself for a while, explaining his history with music and that he was in a comedy band. Her eyebrows shot up when he mentioned the name of the band. He talked a bit about Game Grumps too, but she seemed confused. 

“I’ve seen people play games on their phones before, but I don’t really understand how it works. Is that what you do on your show?” she asked. Dan realized that, having died over fifty years ago, she had never used the internet or played a video game. She only knew about modern technology from what she saw people do in the park. 

Dan found himself in a long-winded explanation of what YouTube was and that most people who had used the internet their entire lives didn’t understand the technical aspects of why it worked either. 

She asked questions about movies and books. He did his best to fill in some gaps for her about the past fifty years. They talked for hours, Dan putting his phone back up to his ear every time someone walked by. 

“There used to be some people who would show movies projected on the side of the building with the bathrooms. I saw Jurassic Park and Ghost Busters and a few others. They watched Psycho too. I recognized that one.” She said. 

“I thought you didn’t remember anything,” Dan said. 

“It’s weird whenever I think about things I knew before. Like, I remembered the things that happened in the movie and I knew that I’d seen it before, but I didn’t have any context for it. I don’t remember where I saw it or who I saw it with or anything like that. I just know that I’ve seen it. It’s the same with everything I knew before I died. Food and books, history and politics. I have the facts in my head but no specific memories of them.”

Dan didn’t know what to say to this. They fell into a comfortable silence. The smile started to fade off her face. This tugged at Dan’s heart. Despite the weird circumstances of their meeting, Dan was starting to really like her. She was sweet and he felt relaxed talking to her. Looking at her face, so sad and yet hopeful, Dan decided that he was going to do whatever he could to help her. He had no idea what kind of hep that might be, but he was willing to do it. 

She looked back up at him. “The sun is going down. The park is going to close soon You should get going before your car gets locked in here overnight.”

Dan looked up at the sky. She was right. The sun was going down and he hadn’t even noticed. No wonder he was so hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. His stomach had growled a few times, but he had ignored it, not wanting to stop the conversation. “Yeah, I should go. I probably won’t be able to come back tomorrow, but the next day I’ll have a few hours I can spend here. I’ll bring you a book and turn the pages for you. Or I can bring my laptop and we can watch a movie,” Dan said. He felt bad that she would have to spend next day alone, but there wasn’t anything he could do. She didn’t seem to be too bothered by it though.

They stood up and said their goodbyes. Dan reached out on instinct to give her a hug, stopping just short when he realized that he had never tried to touch her before and he didn’t know if he could. She saw him hesitate and smiled. She reached out to where his hand was awkwardly hovering, mid hug. Her fingertips touched his and he felt one of the strangest sensations he had ever experienced in his life. It was cold and tingly and strange but not unpleasant. When she put her hand through his, the sensation traveled all the way up his arm. 

“What does it feel like?” she asked quietly. 

“Cold. And . . . It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s not like anything I’ve ever felt before. What does it feel like to you?” 

“The same as it feels when I go through anything else. Cold. And kind of . . . Fuzzy? I guess. That doesn’t really make sense. Like you said it’s kind of hard to describe.” 

They stood there for a moment with her hand going through his, marveling at the sensation. She took her hand away first. “You should go. They are going to lock the gate soon. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow,” she said, looking down. She took a step back. Dan was suddenly afraid she would disappear again. 

“Wait! I have one more question before you go.” Dan had about a hundred more questions he wanted to ask her, but he decided to narrow it down to just one more for tonight. “Do you sleep?” It was the first one that came to mind and he was genuinely curious. 

“No,” she said, a hint of sadness coming back to her voice, “I don’t get tired.” And with that she disappeared and Dan was left to walk back to his car alone. 

He drove out of the parking lot just as the park employee was about to close the gate. As he turned on to the road, he caught a glimpse of her in his rear-view mirror of her standing next to the employee watching him put the large padlock that kept the gate closed in place. 

 

 

You stood in the water several hours after Dan left. You looked up at the stars, trying to remember what sleep was like.

You couldn’t believe how nice Dan was being. It had been kind of him to offer to bring you books and movies. You had no idea what you expected when you had told him about yourself, but he had been understanding. You had enjoyed the time you spent together. You found yourself excitedly wondering what book he would bring you or what movie the two of you would watch, your giddiness sending small rippling waves through the nearby water. 

This was the happiest you had ever been. For the first time you could remember, you had a friend.


End file.
